Jonathan Strahan - Swords & Dark Magic - The New Sword and Sorcery

“Take heed, aspirants,” muttered Molnar, absorbed in his work. “This journey has been loosely planned, but only inside the library itself can the index enchantments give more precise and reliable…ah. Case in point. This book has moved itself.”

“Twenty-eight Manticore East,” said Astriza. “Border of the Chimaera stacks, near the Tree of Knives.”

“The tree’s gone,” said Molnar. “Vanished yesterday, could be anywhere.”

“Oh piss, ” said Astriza. “I really hate hunting that thing.”

“Map,” said Molnar. Astriza dropped to one knee, presenting her back to Molnar. The Master Librarian knelt and unbuckled the heavy volume that she wore as a sort of backpack, and by the red light of the floating lanterns he skimmed the pages, nodding to himself. After a few moments, he resecured the book and rose to his feet.

“Yvette’s book,” he said, “isn’t actually a proper grimoire, it’s more of a philosophical treatise. Adrilankha’s Discourse on Necessary Thaumaturgical Irresponsibilities . However, it keeps some peculiar company, so we’ve got a long walk ahead of us. Be on your guard.”

They moved into the stacks in a column, with Astriza leading and Molnar guarding the rear. The red lanterns drifted along just above them. As they took their first steps into the actual shadows of the shelves, Laszlo bit back the urge to draw his sword and keep it waiting for whatever might be out there.

“What do you think of the place?” Casimir, walking just in front of Laszlo, was staring around as though in a pleasant dream, and he spoke softly.

“I’m going to kiss the floor wherever we get out. Yourself?”

“It’s marvelous. It’s everything I ever hoped it would be.”

“Interested in becoming a Librarian?” said Yvette.

“Oh no,” said Casimir. “Not that. But all this power…half-awake, just as Master Molnar said, flowing in currents without any conscious force behind it. It’s astonishing. Can’t you feel it?”

“I can,” said Yvette. “It scares the hell out of me.”

Laszlo could feel the power they spoke of, but only faintly, as a sort of icy tickle on the back of his neck. He knew he was a great deal less sensitive than Yvette or Casimir, and he wondered if experiencing the place through an intuition as heightened as theirs would help him check his fears, or make him soil his trousers.

Through the dark aisles they walked, eyes wide and searching, between the high walls of book spines. Tendrils of mist curled around Laszlo’s feet, and from time to time he heard sounds in the distance—faint echoes of movement, of rustling pages, of soft, sighing winds. Astriza turned right, then right again, choosing new directions at aisle junctions according to the unknowable spells she and Molnar had cast earlier. Half an hour passed uneasily, and it seemed to Laszlo that they should have doubled back on their own trail several times, but they were undeniably pressing steadily onward into deeper, stranger territory.

“Laszlo,” muttered Casimir.

“What?”

“Just tell me what you want, quit poking me.”

“I haven’t touched you.”

Astriza raised a hand, and their little column halted in its tracks. Casimir whirled on Laszlo, rubbing the back of his neck. “That wasn’t you?”

“Hells, no!”

The first attack of the journey came then, from the shadowy canyon-walls of the bookcases around them, a pelting rain of dark objects. Laszlo yelped and put up his arms to protect his eyes. Astriza had her swords out in the time it took him to flinch, and Yvette, moving not much slower, thrust out her hands and conjured some sort of rippling barrier in the air above them. Peering up at it, Laszlo realized that the objects bouncing off it were all but harmless—crumpled paper, fragments of wood, chunks of broken plaster, dark dried things that looked like…gods, small animal turds! Bless Yvette and her shield.

In the hazy red light of the hovering lanterns he could see the things responsible for this disrespectful cascade—dozens of spindly-limbed, flabby gray creatures the rough size and shape of stillborn infants. Their eyes were hollow dark pits and their mouths were thin slits, as though cut into their flesh with one quick slash of a blade. They were scampering out from behind books and perching atop the shelves, and launching their rain of junk from there.

Casimir laughed, gestured, and spoke a low, sharp word of command that stung Laszlo’s ears. One of the little creatures dropped whatever it was about to throw, moaned, and flashed into a cloud of greasy, red-hot ash that dispersed like steam. Its nearby companions scattered, screeching.

“You can’t tell me we’re in any actual danger from these,” said Casimir.

“We’re tell me can’t,” whispered a harsh voice from somewhere in the shelves, “known, known!”

“ Any actual you, known, from these in danger, ” came a screeching answer. “Known, known, known!”

“Oh, hell,” shouted Astriza, “shut up, everyone shut up! Say nothing!”

“Known, known, known,” came another whispered chorus, and then a dozen voices repeating her words in a dozen babbled variations. “Known, known, known!”

“They’re vocabuvores,” whispered Master Molnar. “Just keep moving out of their territory. Stay silent.”

“Known,” hissed one of the creatures from somewhere above. “All known! New words. GIVE NEW WORDS!”

Molnar prodded Lev, who occupied the penultimate spot in their column, forward with the butt of his staff. Lev pushed Laszlo, who passed the courtesy on. Stumbling and slipping, the aspirants and their guides moved haltingly, for the annoying rain of junk persisted and Yvette’s barrier was limited in size. Something soft and wet smacked the ground just in front of Laszlo, and in an uncharacteristic moment of pure clumsiness he set foot on it and went sprawling. His jaw rattled on the cold, hard tiles of the floor, and without thinking he yelped, “Shit!”

“Known!” screeched a chorus of the little creatures.

“NEW!” cried a triumphant voice, directly above him. “New! NEW!”

There was a new sound, a sickly crackling noise. Laszlo gaped as one of the little dark shapes on the shelves far above swelled, doubling in size in seconds, its grotesque flesh bubbling and rising like some unholy dough. The little claws and limbs, previously smaller than a cat’s, took on a more menacing heft. “More,” it croaked in a deeper voice. “Give more new words!” And with that, it flung itself down at him, wider mouth open to display a fresh set of sharp teeth.

Astriza’s sword hit the thing before Laszlo could choke out a scream, rupturing it like a lanced boil and spattering a goodly radius with hot, vomit-scented ichor. Laszlo gagged, stumbled to his feet, and hurriedly wiped the awful stuff away from his eyes. Astriza spared him a furious glare, then pulled him forward by the mantle of his cloak.

Silently enduring the rain of junk and the screeching calls for new words, the party stumbled on through aisles and junctions until the last of the hooting, scrabbling, missile-flinging multitude was lost in the misty darkness behind them.

“Vocabuvores,” said Master Molnar when they had stopped in a place of apparent safety, “goblin-like creatures that feed on any new words they learn from human speech. Their metabolisms turn vocabulary into body mass. They’re like insects at birth, but a few careless sentences and they can grow to human size, and beyond.”

“Do they eat people, too?” said Laszlo, shuddering.

“They’d cripple us,” said Astriza, wiping vocabuvore slop from her sword. “And torture us as long as they could, until we screamed every word we knew for them.”